


The Kitchen Disaster

by hydianway



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: rs_games, Cooking, Domestic Fluff, Graphic Depictions of Gross Food, Humor, M/M, Magic, Post-Hogwarts, R/S Games 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-10
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2018-08-29 11:32:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8487697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydianway/pseuds/hydianway
Summary: R/S Games 2016 - Day 29 - Team PlaceSirius is hungry and there is nothing in the cupboards fit to eat, so he decides to take matters into his own hands. There is no way that this could go wrong, none at all.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Team:** Place  
>  **Title:** The Kitchen Disaster  
>  **Rating:** PG  
>  **Warnings:** None  
>  **Genres:** Fluff  
>  **Word Count:** 3300  
>  **Summary:** Sirius is hungry, and there is nothing in the cupboards fit to eat. There is no way that this could go wrong, none at all.  
>  **Prompt:** #22 - Picture of a British pantry from the 1970s.  
> 

It starts, as many things do around the Black-Lupin household, with Sirius having an idea.

As ideas go, this seems a harmless enough one, particularly compared to the now-notorious ideas Sirius has come up with over the years, ideas which usually lead directly to property damage, embarrassing boils on the face of some unfortunate Slytherin, hi _lar_ ious changes to the colour of the stones in very public parts of the Hogwarts castle,* or other more generalised mayhem and subsequently long stretches of time spent in detention.

This time however, Sirius’s idea is quite simply that he is very hungry, and if it were at all possible he would like to have something to eat.

Unfortunately for Sirius, neither he nor Remus has been shopping in some time, and their cupboards are bare of anything an actual human person might want to eat.

‘Remus,’ he calls, looking in the pantry and making a disgusted face, ‘Remus, there's nothing in the cupboards.’ He peers around the back of some tins of, well, something that doesn’t bear thinking about, but all he turns up is yet another container of drinking chocolate.

‘Well, find something,’ Remus calls back from the bedroom, sounding groggy and slightly muffled.

‘There’s nothing here,’ Sirius says, now opening the door of the refrigerator and pouting spectacularly.

‘I’m sure there is, don’t bug me about it,’ Remus says. ‘It’s too early in the day.’

‘It’s nearly ten o’clock,’ Sirius says, and decides that the best way to proceed in this conversation is to walk into the same room as the other participant. As the Black-Lupin household occupies approximately forty run down square metres on the third floor of a dull London apartment building, this necessitates walking about six steps out of the kitchen and down the hallway past the bathroom, in order to stand just inside the door to the bedroom and look at the bundled up lump in the middle of the bed that is a particularly cranky, tired Remus Lupin.

‘Go away, Sirius, I’m tired,’ says the lump.

‘I know,’ says Sirius. ‘I’m sorry.’ He walks over and sits down on the edge of the bed. ‘You know what, don’t worry about it, I was just being a bit of a drama queen.’

‘Were you missing me, after that whole hour you just spent with only your own reflection for company?’ Remus asks. His tone of voice might have been referred to as 'teasing,' were it at all audible over the muffling of the blankets. 

‘There was no-one else around at all to admire my truly magnificent air of aristocratic nonchalance,’ says Sirius, who has a knack for interpreting these things. ‘I told James about it in a letter, but it isn’t quite the same as having an in-person admirer.’

‘You’re joking, but I bet you did tell James that you looked especially dashing this morning and there was no-one around to appreciate it,’ says Remus. ‘I'm onto you, Black.’

‘You’re just put out that you didn’t have the opportunity to ogle me while I was bent over in the kitchen trying to find something to eat in that infernally dusty pantry of ours.’

‘Really?’says Remus, still sounding muffled, but also somewhat amused. ‘What an intriguing image.' The lump shuffles itself around underneath the blankets, and Remus’s head pops out from under the covers, bleary eyed and with tousled, greasy hair. He smiles at Sirius, and Sirius finds himself unable to do anything but grin helplessly back. 'Pity I’m not exactly in the mood for-- well, anything involving moving, actually.’

‘Pity,’ Sirius agrees, and resists the urge to do something awful and sappy, like brush the hair off Remus’ forehead or kiss him on the cheek. Just because they’re sharing a flat (and a bed, and a whole kitchen that’s completely empty of actual edible food) it doesn’t mean they suddenly have to start being horrible and sweet and make everyone within ten yards feel like losing their tea. 

‘You know,’ Remus says, interrupting his train of thought and sighing, ‘you’re probably right about it being late enough that I really ought to be up. Give me five minutes and put the kettle on so there’s coffee when I get there, and I’ll come see what I can do about pointing you in the direction of food. I won’t cook anything, mind, but I’ll see if I can spot any possibilities your ridiculous wizard brain has missed.’

‘Alright,’ says Sirius, and does in fact, lean down to kiss him (but on the mouth and quite hard, so there is a smaller chance of him being identified as an irredeemable sap).

Remus’s head disappears under the blankets again, and Sirius goes off to the kitchen to hunt down the coffee (which is instant, disgusting, and in one of many distinctly dusty jars lurking at the back of the cupboard, but it will do) and put the kettle on the stove. He gets a mug out of the cupboard, and puts it on the bench. After a second’s apparent consideration, he gets another mug out of the cupboard, and places it next to the first. A few teaspoons of the weird little flakes go into each cup, and he stands and waits for the water to boil, picking at the chipping corner of the bench with his thumb nail.

Back in the bedroom Remus has sat up, and he allows himself a full three seconds sitting on the edge of the bed to grimace at the pain that courses through in his shoulder and ankle at his first attempt to stand-- he really must remember to strap the ankle up later, unless he wants to be hobbling till the next full moon and beyond-- and compose himself for getting up. He suppresses a hiss of pain as he does so, takes two steps to grab a jumper off the back of the chair, and hobbles out of the bedroom.

In the kitchen, what meets his eyes is as charmingly domestic a scene as could be, at least with Sirius involved. The bench is relatively clear of dishes or other more general debris, the rest of the room almost tidy, and the the sun is coming through the living room window at a particularly lovely angle, highlighting the sort of picturesque shabbiness to the place that both he and Sirius would swear blind they aren’t trying for on purpose, but in fact almost certainly are.

‘Right then,’ Remus says, leaning on the fridge to take some of the weight off his ankle and taking the mug of coffee Sirius offers him with his free hand. ‘Oh, ta. So what’s the problem?’

‘Well,’ says Sirius, ‘we really don’t have any food. Except drinking chocolate. We have quite a lot of that.’

Remus takes a mouthful of his coffee and almost spits it out. ‘Sugar?’ he asks, after he’s finished choking.  
Sirius makes an apologetic face and hands him the jar, which has a spoon sticking out of it already. Remus puts the coffee on the bench and dumps three heaped teaspoons of sugar into it, and stirs hard to try make it all dissolve. He takes another sip, and smiles in satisfaction.

‘That’s disgusting,’ says Sirius.

Remus nods as cheerfully as a man with the general appearance of a suspiciously solid and beaten-up ghost can, and takes another gulp before putting the cup on the bench and opening up the pantry. Sirius puts an arm around his waist and peers in beside him, hoping that there isn’t something terribly embarrassing and obvious that he’s missed.

‘Well, we certainly aren’t lacking for soup,’ Remus says, after looking around for a few seconds. ‘Merlin only knows whose idea it was to buy that tin of cream of celery.’

‘What?!’ says Sirius. ‘Where?’

‘Right there,’ says Remus, pointing. ‘Oh, look, there’s some oats there, we can make porridge,’ he says a few seconds later, pointing to a bag at the very bottom of the cupboard.

Sirius frowns. ‘I don’t like porridge,’ he says.

‘You did say you were hungry,’ Remus says. 'I'm sure you could manage this once.'

Sirius shrugs, and bends down to reach past Remus and grab it. He’s halfway to putting it on the bench next to the stove when he lets out a terrified yelp.

‘Remus, it has little wormy things in it!’ he says, and drops it to the floor like it’s burned him.

‘Ooh, weevils,’ says Remus, looking down at the cobwebby looking things on bag of rolled oats. ‘That’s interesting.’ He bends over himself, somewhat gingerly, and picks the bag up to put it into the rubbish bin. He sighs and looks back in the pantry. ‘Well, you’re right, unless you like instant coffee or hot chocolate, there doesn’t seem to be anything here, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘We’ll have to do a shop later on. Bit of a pain, but it has to happen sometime.’

Sirius doesn’t respond, and when Remus looks over to him he appears lost in thought. _Oh no_ , thinks Remus, and braces himself.

‘You know, I think I can do something with the soup,’ says Sirius slowly, in a tone of voice which Remus now recognises as a sign that things are going to go south very quickly, and that there is little he can do about it. ‘Lentils are a bit shit, right, but I reckon, if I did one of those transfigurations we learnt in sixth year… that and maybe with the ryvita, I might be able to turn them into something vaguely bread-ish, with the drinking chocolate and the milk powder, and the creamed rice up there, I think I _ought_ to be able to make a chocolate spread. It’ll just be a simple matter of you know--’ here he makes an illustrative flicking gesture with his wand-- ‘and there you are.’

‘I’m going back to bed,’ says Remus, who is suddenly as order of magnitude more tired than he was even a minute before. The point where Sirius starts making actual concrete plans for achieving something (in this case turning tinned lentil soup, creamed rice, ryvita, milo, and instant milk powder into a nutella sandwich) is several steps past the point where he can intervene and actually hope to stop anything happening, and Remus isn't exactly good enough at the fiddly domestic aspects of Transfiguration to be able to step in and suggest an alternative. Under the circumstances, vacating the scene of the disaster-to-be is as good as he can hope for. 

‘That’s fine,’ says Sirius. ‘I’ll call you when I’m done, shouldn’t take long.’

‘Right,’ says Remus, and turns around to leave so he doesn’t have to watch as Sirius summons his chosen ingredients into several pots on the stovetop, gets the tins of lentils and creamed rice to burst with messy, magical _pops!_ , and turn on the gas.

 _At least it’s not an electric stove_ , Remus tells himself as he hobbles back into the bedroom, where he puts his head under the covers and makes a solid effort into ignoring the noises from the kitchen. _Everything would already be on fire if Sirius was trying to do magic on an electric stove_.

Back in the kitchen, Sirius thinks that everything is going just swimmingly. He has the lentil soup, the rice from the creamed rice and the crackers in one saucepan, and the milo, the milk powder, the cream from the creamed rice-- as well as the rather startling new addition of tinned salmon, which he thinks is a masterstroke-- in another saucepan, and they’re both bubbling away nicely. Now all he has to do is turn all the disparate and disgusting ingredients in the first saucepan into bread. He is at least fairly sure that he has most of the things in there that bread is made up of, like some starch and some gluey, binding stuff, and with the heat he can make the sort of, air bubbly bits, just _so_.

With a flick of the wrist, everything in the saucepan starts to bubble and clump together, the gritty brown of the lentils and crackers becoming smoother and paler, and the creamed rice starts to look less like something the cat sicked up and even seems to start to combine with the other ingredients.

‘Brilliant,’ Sirius whispers, and goes to do the same with the contents of the second saucepan. The trick will be getting the fat from the salmon to combine with the other ingredients whilst simultaneously taking all the fishy salmon flavour out of his nutella-to-be.

With a complicated swirling motion of his wand, he siphons off the essence of salmon and sends it into the sink, and with another swish, he tells the milo to play nicely with the milk powder and the creamed rice, and the remains of the salmon to help bind the two together.

When he draws his wand away, everything seems to be going alright: he can almost smell the bread, the chocolate mixture looks delicious, and the tiny, much-ignored voice inside Sirius’s head which likes to tell him exactly how badly his ideas are likely to go is starting to quiet down in anticipation of the plan actually working. _This’ll show Remus_ , Sirius thinks. _And we’ll have something to eat, won’t that be nice._

He goes to stow his wand in his pocket, and at that exact moment the contents of both saucepans decide that they don’t want to be nutella, or bread, or anything else at all: in fact, what they want to do is to explode. And they do, quite spectacularly, splattering the walls, the benches, the floor, the ceiling and Sirius with all manner of sticky, disgusting mess.

‘Merlin’s stinky fucking _socks_!’ Sirius spits out a mouthful of gunk. ‘Bloody, _disgusting_ , hell! This is the absolute-- of all the revolting-- _fuck_.’

Remus, hearing the commotion from his safe haven underneath the covers, wonders if he leaves Sirius for long enough, he’ll stop swearing and start trying to fix whatever horrible mess he’s made in the kitchen.

Several minutes of energetic vitriol later, once Sirius gets up to cursing his ancestors, by name, with a very specific and painful sounding punishment dreamed up for each one to experience in whatever version of the afterlife they’ve ended up in, Remus accepts that his hope is in vain, and makes his labourious way into the kitchen, which looks, if anything, _worse_ than he expected.

Every available surface seems to be covered in a brownish, smellyish, and very sticky goo, which has splattered as far as the opposite wall of the living room, not to mention all over the front of Sirius’s body. Fortunately, the wall by the door to the flat, which is just outside the kitchen, has escaped the worst of the food blast, and Remus leans against this as he clears his throat.

Sirius spins to face him, and launches into a quickfire explanation of how he really, really didn’t know this was going to happen and how he was incredibly, agonisingly sorry about the mess but really, he’d clean it up right away, and again how he definitely, really did not mean to.

‘Well,’ says Remus, when Sirius takes a break long enough for him to get a word in, ‘the kitchen needed a good clean anyway, didn’t it?’ He looks around the room again, and suddenly has the urge to laugh. As tired as he is, he decides he might as well just go for it.

‘What?’ says Sirius, who looks something a little less than dashing with all the food on his face and his clothes and hair, and also very confused as to why Remus is laughing and not fixing him with the world’s most disapproving glare. ‘You’re not--’

‘Look,’ says Remus, sagging back into his chosen wall. ‘I’m much, much too tired to be even a little annoyed, and even if I was less tired I would probably still just find this really, stupidly funny.’ Now he’s started talking, he feels a bit hysterical about it all, and keeps grinning as he continues. ‘I mean, Sirius, you just managed to royally, absolutely fuck up _making a sandwich_ , so much so that I think you might be the first wizard, or even _person_ , ever, to blow up half the kitchen trying to do it, and also, oh, this is a bit mean, but you’re covered in goo, you look ridiculous, I bet that’s going to be utter hell to get out of your hair, and I know you love your hair. And that’s just incredibly funny to me, because as discussed I am very, very tired, and also I don’t think I can be too annoyed at a man who looks as ridiculous as you do right now because _clearly_ , the universe has punished you enough.’

Sirius looks incredibly bemused, or maybe relieved; it’s difficult to tell under all the creamed rice.

Remus takes a few minutes to breathe and get his laughter back under control. ‘Right. I’m just going to-- you’re going to clean this up, it’ll take more than an _scourgify_ or two, look at this book,** chapter two--’ he calls a volume from the bookshelf over to him with a wave of his wand and throws it to Sirius, who catches it, still looking a bit shell-shocked-- ‘and I’m going to go to strap my ankle, get dressed, and go to the shops. And I’m going to get some actual food. Which you will not then proceed to splatter all around our nice kitchen.’

‘Remus--’ Sirius starts, sounding dazed, but Remus is already hobbling to the medical cabinet in the bathroom, shoulders shaking with laughter again.

‘Oh, and when I’m done in here, have a bath, for the love of god,’ Remus calls back. ‘I can tolerate Padfoot’s fur on the sofa, but I’m not having you sitting on anything with that lot all over you.’

‘Yes,’ says Sirius, ‘of course I will, yes.’ There is quiet for a few seconds, then Sirius in the kitchen seems to shake himself back into awareness.

He walks round the corner to stand in the door of the bathroom, where Remus is sat on the edge of the bath, fixing up his ankle, still laughing occasionally to himself. ‘I love you, Moony,’ he says, deciding that dignity flew out the window at about the same time as he caused half the contents of the pantry to fly at the walls.

‘You’re extremely lucky I love you too,’ Remus says, smiling at him as he stands up to test his ankle. Sirius steps toward Remus as if to move in for a kiss, and Remus leaps back, right into the opposite wall. ‘Please don’t try to kiss me though,’ he says very quickly. ‘Not until you’ve cleaned up a bit, at least. Now, if you could just, squeeze aside, a lot, so I can get out of the bathroom? Without touching you at all.’

‘Of course,’ says Sirius, and does so with an exaggeratedly gracious bow and a silly grin. Remus pats him gingerly on a clean part of his back as he passes, and Sirius heads for the bathtub with something like desperation. He really, really hopes that this stuff comes out of his hair.

\-------

* As Hogwarts is built as much with magic as it is ordinary stone, there was some considerable confusion over how a group of fourth year boys had managed to bypass the enchantments which had kept the stones from crumbling, discolouring, or even moving very much at all for the past thousand years or so, all for the sake of a prank. The most popular theory now is that the entrance hall stones, being so old and heavily magicked, had grown somewhat sentient over the years, and after some gentle prompting had decided to turn themselves bright pink, all in the spirit of good fun.

** _The Warlock’s Guide to Simple Household Magic_ , a gift to Remus from his father on the occasion of his moving out of home, which had in turn been a gift to Remus’s father on the same occasion in his life, and as such could be quite amusingly dated-- Did anyone starch anything anymore? Was marriage to a nice girl age twenty _really_ a given? (Unless one was James Potter, of course)-- but did contain some fairly useful spells for cleaning, and also a sneaky hangover remedy at the back that he had gotten rather a lot of mileage out of.


End file.
